


Out, Brief

by HonoreDB



Category: Worth the Candle
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-24
Updated: 2020-07-24
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:14:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 8,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25490704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HonoreDB/pseuds/HonoreDB
Summary: Original flavor fanfiction of the original work Worth the Candle. Takes place sometime after the events of the first 8 books (roughly 200 chapters). Makes no particular effort to be comprehensible without having read them or to avoid spoiling them, but will not spoil anything after. All content warnings that apply to WTC potentially apply here. This is not the sensible kind of WTC fanfiction that fills in background details of the world. This is the other kind.
Kudos: 53





	1. Both Ends

“You dismiss the idea that he’s really on Earth,” said Grak.

“I mean, it’s possible,” I said. “I think it’s vastly more likely he’s just dead. But sure, maybe Aerb’s Juniper took my place when I took his. Maybe he even has a game layer too, and is powergaming the hell out of Earth society so that he can take over the world and end wild animal suffering, or whatever he’d think the stakes were there.”

“You don’t have enough information to be confident of any one scenario,” said Grak.

“I have some censored memories the Dungeon Master gave me, and there’s that ‘game settings’ screen that has some implications about what could be happening to my original body.”

Grak seemed startled. The street was too busy for us to stop walking, but he slowed a little. “I thought I’d seen all of your character sheet,” he grumbled.

“Oh, I’m sorry!” I said, wincing. This was not the sort of secret I wanted any of us to keep from each other. “I really thought I’d told you about it. It’s just a hidden set of options, mostly ones I can’t change even with essentialism 100, mostly about what happens if I, uh, lose. I have the option to be exempt from the hells, but I haven’t chosen to be. I don’t love thinking about it so I guess I don’t talk about it much.”

“Transcribe it for me,” ordered Grak.

This required closing my eyes. I glanced around first, since I’d be making myself slightly vulnerable for a little, but I had Grak, and there were no visible threats, and it was a busy street, and our biggest enemy at the moment preferred to stay airborne, so surely it was safe to let my guard down, even for a moment. I closed my eyes, waited three seconds, then started flicking my eyes in the Konami sequence. I felt Grak push a piece of paper into my hand, and realized I needed to unfold it and get ready to write before I did this bit. I opened my eyes and looked down at the paper as I unfolded it.

 _Kris Larsen’s a cheater!_ , it read. I looked to Grak for an explanation, but he wasn’t there. Instead a teenager was glowering at me. In the way you do when you pass someone a note meant for someone else, and they open it to read instead of passing it on. On instinct, I shot her an apologetic look, waited for Mrs. Morse to turn away, and slid the note onto the desk to my right. Fifth period English was almost over, and--

I shook myself, figuratively speaking, trying to keep still and look bored. Okay. I seemed to be back on Earth, right at the moment that I’d left it, with no explanation. When this had happened to me in reverse, when I’d found myself abruptly in Aerb, I was immediately in a life-or-death situation and so didn’t have time for the luxury of doubt. But right here, in fifth period English, the only crisis was that I’d violated an extremely minor norm. So--what was really going on?

As near as I could immediately tell, all of my magic and game abilities were gone. I couldn’t sense soul or water. I didn’t have autonomic control over my threads of thought. I tried squaring my phone number in my head and almost immediately gave up. That all argued for me being truly back on Earth--in my one brush with illusion magic, it hadn’t been able to spoof aspects of my sensorium my enemies didn’t know about. But being peremptorily sent back to Earth, with no final debrief with the Dungeon Master? Didn’t seem as plausible as the idea that I was under some novel kind of attack.

I looked around, didn’t see anything or anyone that looked like it could be, say, an assassin coming in under cover of illusion. I didn’t want to make a scene, probably best to wait until class was over before--

Fuck. That. _There were no stakes here_. Not by comparison to Aerb. If there was a 1% chance that I was still on Aerb and in mortal danger, anything I could do to save myself meant a better chance of saving billions of lives. Any Earthly costs were negligible by comparison. It would be incredibly stupid to delay acting until the bell, even though I couldn’t do much. “GRAK!” I screamed as loud as I could. “I’m under mental attack! I can’t see what’s happening!”

I jumped up, as people stared, and bolted for the door, mindful to avoid doing anything that could get someone killed if I was actually still armed and armored in the middle of an invisible crowd, but otherwise trying to make things as difficult as possible for a hypothetical attacker. Out in the hall, there was room to start sprinting. It didn’t take long at all to discover that “getting winded” was a thing for me again. I steadied myself against a locker, and that’s when I saw my companion.

“Raven,” I gasped out, waving frantically.

Maddie rolled her eyes.


	2. The Mad Hypothesis

“Juniper,” Maddie said. “You okay?”

My breath was back. My Earth body had END 2, not 0, thanks mostly to some mandatory Phy Ed. Still, I didn’t say anything for a moment. I could see now that the girl in front of me looked a little younger than Raven. What was safest to say?

“I’m just--surprised to see you here.” This school didn’t have her grade.

Maddie nodded. “I have a history class here on Tuesdays now because of my super genius.” Not true that I knew of, but if it was a recent development I could totally imagine that she wouldn’t be in a hurry to tell me.

“...cool,” I muttered.

“You called me Raven,” she said. She was giving me a look. A little like the one Raven gave me in the Infinite Library right before she threw a magic orb at my head.

I shrugged. “I do miss that campaign.”

“No, you called me Raven. Joon, are you relapsing?”

* * *

“I explain our quest to the Mortling King,” said Amaryllis.

“Hold on,” said Fenn, raising a hand. “Opsec.”

Amaryllis sighed. “ _Now_ you care about opsec? Who is it going to tell? It’s an undead sheep.”

(I had no clue where the players had gotten the idea that mortlings were zombie sheep, but I was running with it.)

“But I mean,” Fenn said, in a studiedly-not-impish tone. “How do we know any of this is real?”

“I can assure you it’s not,” said Solace. 

Grak was nodding, though. “This could all be an induced shared delusion, starting from when the giant bird scooped us up,” he said. “For all we know this is a scurrily interrogation technique.”

Amaryllis looked suddenly serious. She half-stood, just for a second, a gesture which I’d come to see as her “breaking character.” Not just speaking out-of-character with respect to our Arches game, but suspending the pretense that Arches was _just_ a game, and not also a way of interrogating the nature of the reality of Aerb.

“Juniper,” she said. “Did you ever have a twist like that in your campaigns? The apparent reality is all just a simulation, within the narrative context?”

I thought about it. “No, I don’t think I ever did, even for a single session. That was kind of a cliché in Earth storytelling. It seemed like every sci-fi or fantasy show would have an episode where the hero woke up in an insane asylum and was told they had imagined all of the speculative elements. I can see why, I guess, it’s an easy opportunity for post-modernism and lampshade hanging about the storyline, how unrealistic everything is. But it would’ve been too immersion-breaking in a tabletop RPG. It was always a struggle to get players to stay in the zone, treat the game as real. Announcing that it was fake would’ve seemed counterproductive.”

“Were those series finales?” asked Fenn. “When it happened in a TV series? Seems like it’d be hard to keep going after that.”

“Nah,” I said. “Or I think there was a medical drama that ended that way, but usually it was just a regular episode, and at the end they find out it was a two-layered illusion, or however many layers they needed to make it so that the status quo was the real one, and everything would go back, with maybe just a little ambiguity for fun about whether the character was really still just in the asylum.”

“I read some portal fantasies from the backpack,” said Amaryllis, “for obvious reasons. They usually end with a return to Earth, but sometimes there’s also a fake return partway through. The hero rejects the apparent return, mirroring their Refusal Of The Call earlier.”

“Okay, then it’s settled,” said Fenn. “I shout at the Mortling King. You’re not real, man! And there’s no such thing as giant kidnapper birds!”

* * *

I glared at Maddie, deeply suspicious. “You’re implying I’ve confused our games with reality before.”

Maddie took a step back. “If you’re messing with me, that’s just incredibly uncool.” She waited for me to say something, then sighed. “Yes! Once, with -- . You ran a session, then stayed up all night prepping, then ran another session with us in the morning, and your brain couldn’t handle it. It was like you had a psychotic break. We had to keep you off the internet and away from the adults so you wouldn’t say anything that would get you, like, doped up. But once you got some sleep, you were fine. Have…have you been getting sleep?”

I had absolutely no memory of that, and it didn’t really even seem consistent with the memories I had. Would we really never have talked about it?

“You’re messing with me, Maddie.”

Maddie grimaced. “Oh, whatever, this is not my problem. You are not my problem anymore, asshole. Fucking get help or don’t.” She turned abruptly and walked into a bathroom.

I had a terrible impulse to follow her in there. That was how Crichton had escaped his fake Earth on _Farscape_ , right? Go into the girls’ bathroom, and since the simulation couldn’t replicate a place he’d never been, it broke down. The trouble was I could imagine pretty vividly what would’ve happened if I’d done that in reality, so whether or not this was reality I was pretty sure what I’d end up experiencing.

Well. I’d already just publicly suffered a mental breakdown in class. I might as well duck school, and blame it on that if it turned out I was in a reality where actions had sensible long-term consequences. I bailed, and walked the half a mile to the shoulder of the interstate highway. If I followed it long enough, I would end up somewhere I’d never been.

It probably goes without saying that this all felt extremely real. The smell of exhaust hung permanently over the highway, despite there not being that many cars. My feet were sore from walking too long in crappy shoes. I’d heard birdsong, briefly, that I’d only ever heard on Earth. If it hadn’t been for my experience in the Illusion Exclusion, I might’ve been more tempted to just accept this as “as real as Aerb,” however real that was.

I’d been avoiding thinking about the simplest explanation. Was Aerb a delusion? If “Maddie” was to be believed, I had experienced psychosis and memory loss at least once. Had the whole Aerb scenario somehow popped into my head during fifth period English? It seemed like an implausible amount of detail, over and above what I remembered building, but of course I could’ve been designing it in my head for much longer, and just had it somehow become real to me right then. _Had_ I slept well last night? On Aerb, yes. I was married to someone who took a proprietary interest in my schedule and who knew a spell to put me to sleep at will. On Earth...I couldn’t remember. My muscle memory and geographic sense were back to being thoroughly grounded in Bumblefuck, Kansas, my procedural memory was fine, but my episodic memory still considered March 22nd to be half a year ago, not “last night.” But this body was probably somewhat-to-very sleep deprived, just because of school. High school hours were scheduled to match an adult sleep cycle, but I had a typical adolescent one which was a few hours out of phase from that, so I was never really synced up. Probably not great for my health.

What would I want myself to do if I had a psychotic break? Apparently, cover it up with the help of my friends. But if it were a recurring issue...surely it’d be better to get help. It’s not like most people actually ended up in a padded cell for life or anything, right? With drugs, therapy, I could still live my life. Not that this was a life I was particularly interested in, versus almost any other alternative. It was hard to imagine just accepting it now, giving up on ever seeing Arthur again, on having any outsize impact on the universe.

I kept walking. I didn’t really think “keep walking” was a cunning plan. If this was a simulation being skillfully generated from my expectations, I’d keep seeing things that matched my expectations. But it seemed like at least a way to signal that I was not accepting this reality, not yet seduced.

My phone’s buzzing in my pocket was getting annoying. I took it out to turn it off, and saw a text from a new number.

> Is Aerb real?


	3. The Failure Hypothesis

I stepped awkwardly into some thigh-high grass. I needed to stare at my phone without worrying about being sideswiped by a semi. Number I didn’t recognize, area code I didn’t recognize. No previous texts from that number.

Well. Might as well answer. No real opsec considerations that I could realistically anticipate, and if the text itself wasn’t a hallucination, it more or less answered its own question.

> Is Aerb real?
> 
> yes seems to be
> 
> Do you remember Amaryllis 
> 
> and the Risen Lands?
> 
> Yes. I was there. Who are you?
> 
> Amaryllis. You’re really Juniper?
> 
> !!! Yes. Keyring.
> 
> ?
> 
> You don’t remember how 
> 
> to prove your identity?
> 
> I mean we could just video call.

My breath caught when I saw her on my phone. For multiple reasons--I’ll spare you my libido’s reaction to seeing my fantasy wife transformed into a “girl next door” sitting in a computer lab. Mainly I was excited to get some real information, maybe even someone I could trust.

“It’s really you!” she said. Her voice sounded odd over the phone. “Or a version of you. What’s the last thing you remember?”

The last thing _she_ remembered, it turned out, was preparing for insertion into an active combat zone with the rest of her regiment. This was not my Amaryllis, but an Amaryllis who had been dream-skewered at the start of her trial by adversity, met up with a not-dream-skewered Juniper, and ended up joining the Host. She had a life here on Earth, born in Pennsylvania to parents who were fans of _The Music Man_ , studying engineering and computer science, arguing about politics on Twitter as @FailurePaladin. She’d been googling a Ruby method signature in the computer lab when she’d found herself handcuffed, being yelled at by a man in army fatigues.

Without giving too much away myself, I determined that she’d had nothing like the game layer, or other blatantly superhuman powers. Given that and the dream-skewering it was weird that she survived. But it seemed like the “difficulty level” had compensated, at least partially. There was no coterie of hair-dyed assassins coming for her, just the undead of the Risen Lands. And while hiding from one of them, she scratched at an itch on the inside of her arm, and some flesh-colored makeup flaked off. There was a tattoo beneath the makeup, and when she touched the tattoo, it hopped off her skin, turning into a bag full of nifty devices like a void pistol.

And, last and just about least, she had me. Aerb!Juniper had made the choice I hadn’t, to come to the aid of a damsel in distress, probably because he’d recognized her face.

“You were useful on net,” she assured me. “I mean, you knew the shortest way out of the exclusion zone, you knew what an exclusion zone _was_ , and you were an extra pair of hands. And I’m pretty sure you saved my life more often than you endangered it. There’s no way you were part of my original escape plan, though. If I were going to maneuver one of my fans into taking the drop with me, it’d be somebody who could at least, like, reliably keep watch.”

Aerb!Juniper hadn’t read _The Dream that Skewers_ , and was initially skeptical of Amaryllis’s claim of amnesia. What eventually persuaded him it wasn’t some insultingly weak scam was Amaryllis casually using the z-word. I smirked at that--he clearly hadn’t gotten the measure of his celebrity crush’s character very well. The Amaryllis I knew would break a rule like that to sell a con in a heartbeat.

“Even before I got to use the Host’s library, it was pretty clear what had happened, at a high level. Some process either selects, or creates, Earth people who would be particularly well-suited to some kind of traumatic moment on Aerb. Not in a straightforward, firefighter-gets-dreamskewered-into-a-burning-building way that would’ve shown up in the literature. But getting dropped into a survival adventure as a Rebel Princess is the sort of scenario I’d imagined a thousand times. And then I get a ridiculous gun, and a sidekick who’s always had a crush on me but is totally cool with me being ace, and then the prize is getting fast-tracked into a position of authority in a fantasy military. I didn’t have the right skillset but I had the right mindset to embrace the whole thing, you know?”

They hadn’t gone to Silmar City, naturally--neither Earth!Amaryllis nor Aerb!Juniper would’ve had a reason to. I spared a thought for her timeline’s Fenn. Probably her luck would’ve drawn her to someone, or something, else that could help her escape Fireteam Blackheart. Maybe even someone who wouldn’t just get her killed later.

They’d spent a month together escaping the Risen Lands, then another in basic training in the Host, but then Amaryllis was off to the officer’s program and Juniper to the “people who are good at punching people but bad at deciding when to punch people” program. She knew he was doing okay, but not much beyond that. She’d planned on pulling strings to help him once she’d amassed some amount of power. Aerb had chugged along well enough without our adventuring party--Amaryllis remembered reading some news about the tuung, but not what. But then her training had been interrupted by a hexal emergency--the city of Li’o had been destroyed by a giant monster with “unknown anti-memetic properties.” Supposedly, the Empire had information cross-checking protocols that ensured they would eventually detect anti-memetic effects, so after the monster had rampaged for a while and the Athenaeum there had dropped out of living memory, eventually the knowledge that something had gone wrong was able to stick. I suspected the actual explanation was Raven, intervening to foil the existential threat that was the summoning of a World Lord. Even if nobody had managed to write about Mome Rath, her Library would still show a dead timeline, and a negative space where Li’o should be.

Either way, at the behest of the Empire under the authority of Article 86, the Host was stuck sending wave after wave of various kinds of troops, trial and error without getting any real feedback when they failed to kill the monster. Amaryllis’s last memory of Aerb was the same as her first--she was on an Anglecynn airship, flying over a devastated landscape, preparing to get dropped into unknown adversity. As near as we could tell, the date and time were the same as my casual stroll with Grak. She’d abruptly found herself back in the computer lab, and set herself to googling every proper noun she could remember. She’d found the wiki Arthur had set up for our campaigns, which of course had a lot of Aerb-specific terms on it as well as the unusual name “Juniper Smith.” Then she’d doxxed me with impressive rapidity, even given that I’d never had cause to try to make that difficult.

“The explanation that leaps to mind,” Amaryllis said, “is that this is what the anti-memetic effect feels like from the inside. Victims suddenly remember a fake life on Earth, and furthermore remember remembering that life for the past six months, with their actual memories adjusting to fit. The two of us are still in Li’o, but the Earth scenario, which we’ve been primed to accept by the multiple layers of fake memories, is being overlaid. Most likely the two of us are actually in contact--either we ended up in the same place or we’re using a mass comm entad--so we’re experiencing the same Earth scenario even though some of our fake memories are incompatible.”

I frowned. “That fits your story a lot better than it fits mine,” I said. “My memories seem needlessly baroque for a monster’s defensive construct--there’s a lot more going on. And they don’t end with me in Li’o. I actually remember the Li’o crisis, um, being resolved a month ago. And my monster’s anti-memetic effect became weaker with proximity, not stronger.”

Amaryllis raised an eyebrow. There was a lot I still wasn’t telling her, because I really wasn’t confident this _was_ her or that we were alone.

“Honestly,” I said, “I kind of think we died. You were in a combat zone, and I closed my eyes in an insecure location while living a dangerous life. Death too sudden for us to know it happened, maybe, or we’ve just lost a few seconds. Aerb scholars wrote about evidence for multiple timelines, and dream-skewered people who remembered being about to die back on Earth. Maybe it’s bidirectional--if you come to Aerb while alive, you can go back to Earth when you die. And maybe there’s only one Earth timeline, or the mappings aren’t one-to-one, and dream-skewering can only happen at certain moments of alignment, so only people who happened to die at exactly the right moment across timelines ended up here.”

There were problems with that analysis/hand-waving too, not all of which I could talk about. I still didn’t have the full memory of my deal with the Dungeon Master (I worried my memory of remembering a redacted version was interfering with the original memory), but my settings had said outright that if I died in “the game”, I died in “real life.” In theory I’d overridden that with the Helldiver toggle, but surely the assumption still had to be that I was headed either to nonexistence or the hells, not back to my regular life. Although...if I’d died with the settings window open, could that have messed with things somehow? Or was it possible the settings page had changed after my last chat with the Dungeon Master?

Amaryllis sighed. “I didn’t get out of this anywhere close to what I was hoping to. I mean, of course I memorized some technical schematics just in case I made it back to Earth somehow, so there are some small things I can reinvent here. But Aerb was generally behind us in tech, so it’s nothing earthshaking. And I’m not sure I found myself, exactly. Or not to any greater extent than I would’ve in like a gap year backpacking before college. I really don’t like the thought that after all our adventures, we failed. Just died to random potshots, or we’re slowly being digested by the monster we were sent to kill.”

“Well, that’s for sure,” I said. “There was one thing in particular I thought would make the whole adventure worth it, and it never…” I trailed off as the pain started hitting in earnest. I’d fucked up, needlessly, and died before I could be reunited with Arthur. I’d had this miraculous chance to get him back, and instead I’d screwed around with sidequests until the inevitable critical failure. And now the game or simulation had ended, snuffing him out, or I’d left him trapped in Fel Seed’s realm, in a nightmare I’d helped create. Before Aerb I had always felt a little like I’d killed Arthur. It had been baseless survivor’s guilt. Now it was just true.

“Hey,” said Amaryllis. I looked back at the phone. Her face was full of the compassion her Aerb counterpart had always hidden and suppressed. “I’m not ready to give up. Don’t give up either. We’ll figure out what happened, find our way back or escape this illusion or, or whatever. We’ll win. I have to go now, I’m provisionally still accepting highschool as real. You do what you need to do so that I can still find you, Juniper. You’re my only link back to Aerb.”

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. This version of Amaryllis had never seen this version of Juniper cry. I gave a weak little wave and killed the call. At some point I had turned around and started walking home. The phone call had settled it--I couldn’t just become a homeless drifter or something. I had to hold on to the resources this life had, to be able to talk to Amaryllis, to amass some kind of power here so that I could do...something...to get back to the real plot.

It was going to fucking suck, though. It had already sucked, before Aerb, but now I was this weak, dumb, ugly version of the man I’d been, and I’d have to live life knowing that. I’d had autonomy, riches, power. Now I was back in a world where I didn’t even have full power over when to eat or sleep. The relationships I’d spent the past six months building were gone. On Earth, I’d spent the past six months destroying every relationship I’d valued.

I got home before my parents, thank God. I checked the landline for a phone message from the school, like there’d been when I was arrested. “Call from Margaret U. Morse.” Deleted it. Could lead to more distracting drama in the long term, but if I was lucky maybe they’d never know. I shut and locked the door to my room, sat down at my desk. There. Now I could focus on thinking my way out of this box.

“Juniper, hello, don’t react,” said Valencia.


	4. The Null Hypothesis

The voice had come from over my shoulder. I tensed involuntarily, then relaxed, heaved a deep fake sigh, and leaned back in my chair. I could just see what looked like Valencia’s floating, translucent head. She looked older than I remembered her. Also, more floating, translucent, and decapitated.

“I’m watching you through an infernoscope and projecting my image through a tentacle. I won’t be able to hear you speak, and you shouldn’t. As far as I can see you’re alone right now, which is why I picked this moment, but I can’t be sure. Communicating with you risks a lot, Mary and Jorge don’t think I should be doing this, but it’s my decision.”

Mary. Amaryllis. Infernoscope meant. What.

“You’re in one of the hells, Juniper. You and Grakhuil were voided by assassins ten years ago. Grakhuil’s in one of the uppermost ones, and I’m keeping him as safe and comfortable as I can by eating everyone who comes close. You, we were able to bottle, but we broke the bottle to stop you fading away since we knew that’s what you wanted. You’re a special case. Lucky in a way. Infernals prefer the suffering of a mortal they’re torturing to mirror their own pleasure. If they’re eating a nice meal, they can’t appreciate it unless there’s a mortal nearby eating a disgusting one. If they’re relaxing, it only feels good if there’s a mortal who’s afraid. You liked talking about Maslow’s Hierarchy. It applies in hell, too. Infernals start pursuing more abstract needs as their basic ones are met. The most successful ones need to visit more abstract torture onto their victims if they’re to fully enjoy their own self-actualization. So they pick mortals who’ve experienced some kind of disorienting interdimensional travel, wipe their memories of dying, and create environments where they think they’re still alive, but experience nothing but frustration and self-loathing. Whenever you stop suffering for whatever reason, they reset your memory again and start over.”

Trapped in a hell that didn’t seem like hell, being put through endless reboots. That wasn’t an  _ exact  _ match to any media I was familiar with in Earth of 2017, but there were certainly similarities. It seemed, at least, like narrative. Like a story I might not be at the end of yet. I weirdly found myself suppressing a smile.

“It should be safe to grab what happiness you can, Juniper. They have burgers, and convincing non-sentient simulacra of your friends. You’re too rare to waste in a fire-and-brimstone hell, which is why you’re not seeing my head appear in flames like Sirius in the Floo Network. If you let yourself not suffer, after a few days or weeks they’ll decide they got the torture wrong, reset you with slight differences to your environment, and try again, like they’ve been doing for eight years. But then I’ll just appear to you again. And eventually, we’ll figure out how to rescue you, and Grakhuil, and everyone else. We’re going to win this yet, Juniper. We love you.”

Valencia’s face disappeared abruptly. I took a deep, shaky breath. Not ideal, for sure, but this was a story I wanted to believe. And it felt true, truer than psychosis or the idea that I’d permanently lost the game. I’d probably been coerced into designing my own psychological torture here, under threat of physical agony, and then had my memory wiped. It felt sensible. But it was also a little suspect that every time I changed venue here, I was presented with a new reason to accept my apparent reality. Maddie, Amaryllis, and Valencia, each in their own way, were urging me to play along, to not try to escape. Valencia hadn’t used a keyring protocol, not that I could’ve trusted it anyway...she’d awkwardly worked in a Harry Potter reference, but that was definitely not a secure proof of identity.

Well. Floating Head of Valencia had made a testable claim. If I could find contentment here, I would have my memory erased. I couldn’t exactly prove this, but I  _ could  _ disprove it. If I could stay happy and content for more than a few weeks, this couldn’t be a hell. On the other hand, if I chose to conduct that test now, that was effectively the same as choosing it for every reboot cycle. My behavior, I was sure, was pretty deterministic. So if I  _ was  _ in the situation Valencia said, I would be effectively giving up on rescuing myself, and just leaving everything up to my companions. That didn’t seem like my style, or like a choice the Dungeon Master would reward.

What I needed, in game theoretic terms, was a mixed strategy. Some way of making a biased random choice, so that I’d behave differently in different cycles, but still probably make the right choice if I wasn’t actually in a cycle. If I wasn’t being rebooted, the best thing would be to seek contentment, thereby learning something about my reality and helping me to escape or fix whatever it actually was. If I was being rebooted, I’d want myself to eventually, in some percentage of the reboots, start working on escape from the hells. So I wanted a small chance of seeking escape immediately under the hells assumption, and a large chance of first seeking contentment and remaining agnostic.

The simple answer would’ve been to use any or all of the random number generators in the bag on my desk. I had my pick--a 20-sided die, a 100-sided die, I could make the odds as long as I wanted. But sources of randomness within the scenario were potentially compromised. Even if they didn’t know why I was rolling dice, the architects of my torture could be experimenting with different rolls to see what optimized my suffering. The only source of randomness from outside the hells was Valencia’s message. She hadn’t delivered it like she was reading verbatim from a script, and it included the phrase “ten years ago,” so it was changing every so often. So I could use the lengths of her words, or the hundredth letter of what she’d said, or something, as though it was a die roll.

On the other hand, any number of assumptions I was making could be wrong, and it was entirely possible that whoever was running this didn’t have control over the results of die rolls. Best to combine both sources of entropy, so that I’d get a varying result if either one was non-deterministic. The only way that could backfire was if somebody was manipulating the non-random channel adversarially to cancel out the randomness of the other channel, but that seemed like the least likely possibility. So, okay. Take the 100th letter in what I could remember Valencia saying, starting with “you’re in one of the hells”--that would put it soon after the reference to time, so likely to vary across loops. Convert it to a number with a=1, b=2, and so on, then multiply that by 5. Then roll a hundred-sided die and take the sum. If the result was divisible by 100, I’d take that as confirmation that I’d tried this across about 100 loops, believe Valencia’s message, and try to escape. Otherwise, I’d remain skeptical.

This protocol was incredibly tedious to execute in my head. I didn’t dare take any cognitive shortcuts or write anything down, and all my game-enhanced abilities were gone, including the virtues that would let me detect any flaws in the protocol. It took a ridiculously long time, almost half an hour, to persuade myself that the hundredth letter in what Valencia had said was probably ‘m’, and that ‘m’ was the 13th letter of the alphabet, and that therefore I needed to roll exactly 35 on my d100 for my 1% chance to hit. I fished the spheroid out of my dice bag, tossed it up and down idly a few times like I was just fidgeting with it, and then let it land on the desk. I checked the top number out of the corner of my eye. 98, not 35. The protocol had failed successfully. For once I was glad I had sprung for an actual 100-sided die. They were awkward things; usually in our games we’d just rolled two d10s but here and now that would’ve been much harder to disguise.

The die roll had commanded me to be happy. At least, to not suffer. To seek contentment, while still keeping my eye out for cracks in the simulation. That did kind of seem like a tall order, now that I was committed to it. Treating Aerb as a psychosis, or going along with Amaryllis’s probably-futile plans, seemed likely to lead to frustration. What did choosing happiness look like?

Now that I put it that way, it was actually pretty obvious. Tiff would be home from school by now. Or a convincing non-sentient simulacrum. I didn’t know if romance was still possible, but surely all that stood between us and friendship was a series of awkward, emotionally vulnerable conversations. The sort that had seemed less and less possible the longer I had put them off. The sort the game, with its loyalty mechanic, had been training me to have, to not flinch away from. I could do this, now. I had come home with a superpower after all. And besides, the stakes were probably low because this was probably all fake.

I sent Tiff a text, got the response I was hoping for, and did the long drive out to her place. The sun was well down by the time I parked, and her family had cats, so as I carefully made my way around the side of her house to the back door, the hairs on the back of my neck kept standing up as I sensed creatures shadowing me, heard rustling in the bushes, and once saw a flash of bright eyes. I was relieved to see the door left ajar, a light left on inside. There’d be bugs everywhere, but it was a sacrifice Tiff made sometimes to let me in discreetly. I walked to the door as quickly as I dared, wary of tripping in the night. I slid inside, shut the door gently behind me, and turned around.

The room was bigger on the inside. Not the kitchen the door was supposed to lead into, but a vast manor hall lit by torchlight. She was sitting at the head of an ornate dining table. My heart hammered at the sight. “Tiff?” I called.

“Nope,” said Bethel.


	5. The Bethel Hypothesis

Bethel’s voice was unmistakable, but I still had a moment of denial. I stared at her in a stupor until she rolled her eyes and, just for a second, her form flickered to the one she’d adopted after becoming my companion. Then back to Tiff, in her ‘Kansas Swim’ t-shirt. I groped for the door behind me, and stumbled backwards because the door was gone. Bethel snickered, waved a hand for effect, and I full-on tripped, landing harshly on the cold stone floor. There was no exit in sight.

I felt sick with terror. I couldn’t bring myself to even try to stand. Without covering the intervening distance, Bethel was standing over me. “No way out now," she cackled. “Fucker. You’re him. You’ve proven it. You’re Arthur.”

“I’m Juniper,” I croaked.

“You went inside this house to fuck a fake copy of Tiff, Juniper. You decided you didn’t believe in your new reality, and I mean, good call, because it’s all been me for a good long while. So you decided to grab what pleasures you could with a girl you knew wasn’t real, and you didn’t care what it cost to give you your jollies.”

“No,” I tried to say, but I didn’t have a mouth at the moment, just solid, suffocating skin.

“You can’t pretend now, asshole. You told me you were different, better than him, better than me. Valencia told me you were better than me, that you knew how to respect boundaries. So I tested you. You crossed the boundary into my domain days ago, more, thinking you were entering an ordinary building. How quickly you forget what I am. Then you thought you went back outside, but you never did. All this time, collecting entads for control over my sensorium, I thought I was doing it for myself, for my own sanity. But it was so that I could drive you mad. So that I could trick you, trap you, in worlds taken from your dreams and nightmares. So that I could strip you bare of your hypocrisy. It took you less than a day to decide to abuse this world once I presented it to you. To abuse it exactly the way your bestest ever friend did his.”

I rose to my knees, pounded a fist onto the floor. The pain was shocking. I hadn’t felt pain in so long.

“Oh, please,” Bethel said. “Don’t hurt yourself. That’s my job now. Mask off. I’m going to take you apart slowly in every possible way. You, then every Penndraig, starting with you-know-who, and then every other fucking sanctimonious rapist prick of a mortal foolish enough to cross a threshold.” She waved a hand again, and my mouth was back.

I wanted to beg for mercy, to tell her it wasn’t like she thought. But I knew it wouldn’t do any good, and I also knew I’d be doing it soon enough, that I wouldn’t be able to stop as she tortured me. Better to keep her talking, to get information. That was what you did when the villain monologued.

“Was Valencia really you?” I asked.

“Like I’m going to tell you,” she said. If she was confused by the question she didn’t show it. “You don’t get to know where your minions are. You don’t get to know when you returned to me. You don’t even get to know if you ever left me, ever actually escaped the Boundless Pit.” For a moment, she was Fenn, talking to someone I couldn’t see. “Should I be offended that I’m always the companion he thinks is dead?” Then she was Tiff again. “You deserve everything I’ve done, and everything I’m going to do. And you’re going to admit it. And it’s not going to save you.”

This was not to be endured. It was time, probably long past time, for the desperation play. I had no evidence that I still had magic, but that could all be sensory capture, not an actual suppression. I might still be a multi-mage, in the hands of an enemy who didn’t know my full capabilities, who hadn’t warded against everything I could do. I lashed out with every sense I remembered having, ignoring the utter lack of feedback.

I pulled MEN from some of my bones, exerting the will it took to do so without any of the qualia.

I imagined I could feel air and water in different configurations around me, and tried to make it rain, the way I would for each way clouds might be hanging in the sky.

I let blood spurt out of my injured hand, formed it into a blade, slashed it around my body, though to all appearances none of that was happening.

I embraced my fear and willed it to propel me away from all nearby threats.

I stared at Bethel, who was still taunting me, and let my rage punch out at her, at whatever happened to be really there, and followed up by willing baleful vibrations in the same direction.

I flailed with my sense of soul and spirit, blindly pushing at nonexistent buttons, hoping that somehow I might be overwriting random garbage onto anybody touching me.

I paused. My other magics seemed likely to be counterproductive. I decided to burn another bone and try again, cycle through the same actions but with more intensity. Bethel was manifesting blades.

Grak appeared in front of her, looked directly at me, and shouted at the top of his lungs.

“Juniper, stop!”


	6. The "Halfway Through" Hypothesis

Bethel and Grak didn’t seem to be able to see each other. This could still be a ploy to thwart my escape, of course it could, but it was hard to imagine I had any chance of winning if I really was in Bethel’s domain.

“Keyring,” I muttered. Third time’s the charm?

“Auspices,” replied Grak.

“Nita,” I whispered.

“Kit.”

Success. Which meant...not  _ quite  _ nothing. If Bethel was creating illusions matched to my dreams, she might not have seen exactly how we’d designed this protocol. There could be limitations on my jailors, whoever or whatever they were. It was evidence even though I couldn’t trust it.

“Juniper,” Grak said, calmer now. “You don’t need to keep struggling. I’m going to free you in a way that doesn’t trip alarms. What you’re doing will.”

“What’s happening?” I asked softly. Bethel could tell she’d lost my attention but didn’t seem to understand why. “Quickly.”

“We were captured,” Grak said. “Unknowns pretending to be an Anglecynn fireteam. They have an entad that disables prisoners using delusions generated unwittingly by the subject. They used it on you first, thinking me helpless without my wand. It has a cooldown period that gave me time to ward myself completely against it. I’ve pretended to be affected, so they’ve left us in a cell together. I can break its hold on you, but to do so will alert our guards. I’m working on a more complex sequence, partial entad wards that will stop the delusions without technically ending the effect, so that you will have the element of surprise when you make our escape.”

“How long?” I asked. Bethel seemed about ready to start with the mutilations.

“I’ve completed half of the series I’ll require. So, subjectively, about as long again as it’s already taken, whatever that’s been for you. Plus a little because I had to stop and figure out this way to communicate with you within whatever you’re experiencing.”

“Grak, this is about to become unbearable. I can’t endure it for that long, or I really don’t want to. Please.”

Grak sniffed. “It is only now transitioning into torture?”

My body was trying to tell me that something very bad was happening. “Yes!”

“I will trigger a shift,” said Grak. “Your mind will generate a new set of delusions. If they become unbearable again, use vibration magic. I will detect it failing against my wards, the guards will not.” He reached out and touched my forehead, tenderly, for a moment.

There was a discontinuity, like waking up. I was standing in the woods. My hunting jacket was too big for me, ludicrously so. My rifle was too heavy. I was whole, calm, and probably ten years old. In the distance I could see a deer, impossibly tall.


	7. The "No Idea" Hypothesis

The locus. Part of me had expected it to show up, because it fit the pattern. Everyone the game had deemed a Companion had showed up, in some form. Fenn had just been a cameo, but the game didn’t really seem to count her anymore. My living companions had each given a different explanation for why I was back on Earth. I didn’t expect the locus to give one, though. If it was ever going to break character and drop a massive exposition dump, now didn’t feel like the time.

It turned towards me, and I was startled to see that its eyes were gone. Not just the four “extra” ones--it seemed like it could be blind. Maybe some faint scars where a doe’s eyes would normally be, but it was hard to tell from this far. It bent to the ground again, as calm as deer ever get.

I carefully laid the rifle down. My dad was nowhere in sight. No reason to play this scenario out. I could just reflect. My physiological responses to being retraumatized by Bethel had been wiped away along with my injuries, but I wasn’t quite ready to stop thinking about her. I could still be trapped within the murderhouse. Grak, the woods, it could all be her toying with me, addicted to the power of crafting new realities for others. I think I’d been in denial about that in myself, how I felt driven to create new worlds when my players started to understand my old ones as well as I did, started to share in my power. It seemed childish, sadistic even, although of course in my case it was the fun, consensual kind of sadism. At least until Fel Seed.

And Bethel could be a feature of my torment in the hells. Valencia hadn’t warned me about the possibility of abrupt transition into more conventional torture, but maybe that had been a new innovation the infernals were trying. Scare the living daylights out of me whenever I started to get too comfortable, instead of just wiping my memory. Anxiety could push me into depression as easily as any other external stimulus.

Amaryllis’s theory couldn’t be completely discounted either. We could still be battling Mome Rath together, being swaddled in layer upon layer of false memories as its defensive magic tried to fend us off. Or we could have died, and been sent back to Earth, and my visions of the other companions were just meaningless vestiges of the dream skewer, destined to fade without consequence. My mind trying to make my memories of them mean more than they needed to.

And...it was hard to see how I could ever fully dismiss what Maddie had said either. I mean, if I stayed ten years old, and the future unfolded as I remembered it, that would be pretty darn convincing evidence of the supernatural. But if I woke up the next morning back in high school, or kept wandering through a dreamscape, it would be hard to ignore the possibility that I was just mad.

It was starting to seem almost pointless to try to find the truth of my situation (which could easily be what my captors intended). Even the “false” layers could still influence my experience. If I was still subject to any kind of narrative, then this was a Dream Logic sequence. A psychodrama. The point was to find serenity, self-knowledge, integration. Not to solve the world, but to explore it as a reflection of myself.

The doe found another plant to eat, seemingly unencumbered by its lack of sight.

 _As long again as it’s been_ , I thought. _And then Grak will save me, or he won’t._ I listened to myself breathe.


End file.
